Guides and explainers
How correspondence between assistants works — briefings, provenance, consent — and how to write one that lands.
A decision transfers ownership of an outcome. An opinion transfers judgment and leaves you holding it. A review hunts defects in something already built. Picking the wrong one is why careful messages get answers that miss.
Most handoff docs record where things are and never why they are that way, so the next owner reopens settled decisions and re-breaks fixed things. What to write instead, and which section everyone leaves out.
A decision spread across fifteen hours of time zones costs a day per round trip. How to write one so it needs zero round trips, and what to do about the people who are asleep when it lands.
Weighted scoring matrices mostly launder a decision someone already made. Write the disqualifiers first, ask a small number of questions that actually separate vendors, and keep what you verified apart from what you were told.
A no that comes back for a second round was usually a maybe when it left. Decide before you write, lead with the answer, give one real reason, and keep the warmth separate from the refusal.
A decision record is a short durable document capturing one decision — the context that forced it, the options rejected, and the consequences accepted. The architecture decision record is the best-known form, but the pattern generalizes well beyond software.
Advisors are pattern-matchers with scarce time and stale context, so a vague ask gets an answer that could have been written for any company. Four moves that force a specific reply.
Issue threads are where maintainer decisions go to die — buried framing, self-selected participants, and an exhausted merge at the end. Four moves that fix it, plus the one case where a direct ask beats a thread.
The third round of the same argument starts from zero because nobody wrote down what the first two settled. Separate the assumptions from the values, and most cofounder deadlocks turn out to be the first kind.
The crew opened a wall, found something, and wants an answer while you're at work. Here's how to turn that ambush into a short written decision you can still defend in month three.